Hamburg02 June 2010
T-Platforms is already active in supercomputing in Europe for many years. See for instance our Primeur Live! coverage from 5 years ago. In Hamburg they made their splash! entrance into Western Europe, and were the talk-of-the-town, literally, as the centre of the city in the evening was taken over by ISC'10 attendees. Of course, EnterTheGrid/Primeur Magazine had a Live! interview with T-Platforms.

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Alexey Nechuyatov, Director of Product Marketing at T-Platforms, a Moscow-based supplier of HPC systems, software and services, founded in 2002, is a proud man and he has every reason to be so. What he told EnterTheGrid/Primeur Magazine in just half an hour at the ISC'10 Exhibition is quite an impressive story of an ambitious and fast runner-up in the HPC universe. Alexey Nechuyatov in his heart is proud to be Russian too but his mind is thinking globally for the company. And when you took a really good and thorough glance at the T-Platforms booth you were able to see a vendor that is spreading its wings to cover the whole spectrum of the HPC-business. T-Platforms was very present in Hamburg, true to its roots but not afraid to face the world and it seems like the best is eagerly yearning to come.

In fact, T-Platforms already is a Group of four companies with its head office in Moscow, Russia and a staff of 160 people globally. T-Services provides end-to-end modelling, simulation and analysis services. T-Massive Computing is based in Kiev, Ukraine and is specialized in software development, with the Clustrx operating system as the most recent product. Alexey Nechuyatov considers Clustrx as the T-Platforms' baby. T-design is located in Taipei, Taiwan and is responsible there for R&D and HPC hardware products in development. Recently, the company opened an office in Hannover, Germany with the aim of entering the European Union market.

At the product-level, Alexey Nechuyatov noted that T-Platforms is fully embracing the Petascale strategy with a careful eye on the needs of the customer. The company is able to deliver customized hardware with specialized features adapted to the customer's application requirements. Clustrx has provided a remarkable software progress with 1000 of compute nodes. Its T-Blade 2 system packs 64 sockets in a 7U enclosure and has hardware support for collective communications between the cluster nodes. Clustrx OS treats the entire cluster as a uniform hardware resource, scaling to dozen of thousands of nodes and proving near-real-time granular system monitoring and management.

A very popular and hot topic is Green IT. Alexey Nechuyatov assured that T-Platforms has all steps planned to change their approach from air-cooled to water-cooled systems. This is a big hit for the environment since the water can be reused to heat up the buildings. It is also very cost-effective, according to Alexey Nechuyatov who mentioned that 30% of savings can be made with hot water-cooled systems. The chassis is the same for both the air-cooled or water-cooled machines but there is a special water block built inside the water-cooled supercomputers.

T-Platforms is also collaborating with NVIDIA Corporation in the field of general-purpose computing on graphics processing units (GPGPU). Alexey Nechuyatov is very enthusiastic about the innovative NVIDIA Fermi technology. The next generation CUDA architecture, code named "Fermi", is the most advanced GPU computing architecture ever built. With over three billion transistors and featuring up to 512 CUDA cores, Fermi delivers supercomputing features and performance at 1/10th the cost and 1/20th the power of traditional CPU-only servers, according to NVIDIA. Alexey Nechuyatov told EnterTheGrid/Primeur Magazine that while T-Blade 2 is already a rather unique product, delivering a compute-density of 27 Teraflops in 42U rack with Intel Westmere, using Fermi-based blades inside the very same T-Blade 2 enclosure would allow achieving up to 3 times more compute density. This is a very tight and very dense result in comparison with the Cray systems that currently deliver 22 Teraflops/s.

With the opening of the Hannover Office, T-Platforms has expressed its firm intentions to expand its business to Europe and the European Community specifically. A big challenge, according to Alexey Nechuyatov, since it also involves assembly. But he believes the company will be successful because of their strategic answers and services. T-Platforms prouds itself in the fact that each and every cluster that is built has to be different. The company is customizing the product for the client and the infrastructure has to go with it. In this regard, T-Platforms now can withdraw 60KW of heat dissipation from one compute rack with air cooling. What matters the most is the commitment of the company to provide end-to-end services - analysis, recommendations and turn-key data centre construction and integration to customers in need.

Alexey Nechuyatov was very positive about the company's European strategy. He estimates that it will take 2 to 3 years' planning and 3 to 5 years to elaborate the services. These services will consist in simulation capacity for clients, as well as modelling & simulation services. T-Platforms is bound to not only create the market but also deliver a shorter time to market with its products and services.

The big news was saved for the end. Rusnano, a state corporation in Russia, has selected T-Platforms as their supplier for computational services. T-Platforms will be accumulating requests and will make a selection of 40 tasks, 20 of which will be nanotechnology-related, from industrial production organisations. These tasks will be running on T-Platforms systems. This is a means of running computational tasks with an investment of only 25% of the total project cost - while introducing HPC to a wider market. The collaboration with Rusnano stretches from the development model to the complete product. With this wider collaboration of universities, Russia is setting a trend, Alexey Nechuyatov explained.

The selected organisations will receive 75% of the funding of the total computational project costs. The remaining 25% will be paid by the selected organisation. The Rusnano deal has been signed and closed for 6 million USD. This contract is also good for the European market because it will accelerate the pace for development.

Alexey Nechuyatov was kind enough to offer EnterTheGrid/Primeur Magazine an exciting tour around the T-Platforms booth with the Lomonosov T-Blade 2 system at the focal point. A really intrusive system for existing environments, pondered Alexey Nechuyatov, and there was an undeniable passion in his eyes.